Of Leaves of Gold
by FalselyTrue
Summary: Briar Rose's life, told in four parts.


**Title: Of Leaves of Gold  
Summary: Briar Rose's life, told in four parts.  
Rating: T  
Warnings: A little bit of cussing at the very end, nothing stronger than your general episode of Glee. Not even that, actually. It's extremely mild.  
Length: 2,914  
Disclaimer: I don't own the Sisters Grimm. Or the Lord of the Rings because that's where I got the poem from.  
A/N: This has been a work in progress for the past…three months? I began in November, wrote a rough and then began expanding it. I only just finished it now.  
BETAby: the lovely EclipseTheVampire.**

_…  
I sang of leaves, of leaves of gold and leaves of gold there grew  
Of wind I sang, a wind there came and in the branches blew…  
…But if of ships I now should sing, what ship would ever come to me?  
What ship would bear me ever back across so wide a sea?  
…_

**I. Princess (the royalty kind)**

Briar Rose grew up a princess.

Her guardian fairies, Mallowbarb and Sweetwater, loved her and doted on the little princess dearly as she grew up in her parents' majestic castle. She never wanted for anything, between her fairies and her parents.

Out of her seven, good Christening gifts (and her one bad one), the sixth was a magical singing voice. Anything Briar sang of would come true or spring to life. This gift was both a blessing and a curse—Briar's singing voice was beneficial when a rain was needed during a drought or it was unbearably hot during the summer, but her parents lived in constant fear that the gift would be discovered. They already shuddered in fear about the death by poison at sixteen and worrying about some common thief kidnapping her and forcing the poor princess to sing of her parent's death.

Mallowbarb worried sometimes that Briar Rose would hear an inappropriate song and sing it in public (oh, the _shame_), but she needn't have worried. Briar was a sweet, innocent child and was very discreet with her magic.

Her favorite song turned the leaves in her mother's garden into gold and the flowers into intricately carved jewels. As Mallowbarb and Sweetwater were garden fairies as well as fairy godmothers, visiting dignitaries dismissed it as the princess's godmothers missing home a bit too much. In truth, Briar did it because it was one of the few things that would make her mother smile in this gloomy castle.

She didn't do it often because the spell lasted for a long time, and most of all, it tired her out for days and days. But six year old Briar loved to see her mother's face light up in delight.

When Briar Rose was eight years old, her cat died, and she sang it back to life. But it came at a cost—one of her father's advisors grew deathly ill, trembling at the edge of life and death, and Mallowbarb had to sit her down to explain.

Magic came at a cost—gold and silver and jewels came from the earth, and healing pulled energy from your life force, simply speeding up the process rather than letting time go about it naturally. When something died, their life energy dissipated into the universe, and bringing it back to life meant the life energy had to come from someone else.

Briar Rose let her kitten die and the advisor was "healed", his life energy returned to him.

Briar Rose swore to never sing of life and death ever again.

**II. Winds (the garden kind and the breathing kind and the sailing kind)**

When Briar Rose turned ten, she sang of wind-beings who would dance with her in the gardens, and an obliging wind came to play, rustling through the branches of her mother's golden garden. It picked up a few fallen leaves and fashioned itself into a human-like being.

These wind-people, as they came to be known, stayed as Briar's constant companions, right up until the day she pricked her finger on a poisoned rose (oh, the irony) and fell to sleep for a hundred years.

The wind-people picked her up and placed her in a beautiful rose-grown bower and guarded it jealously, strengthening walls of thorns and keeping the weakened stone walls from crumbling down upon their lovely Princess Briar Rose.

When they finally let Prince Charming in, the wind-people were watching anxiously to make sure he was the one for Princess Briar Rose, their creator. If he hadn't been, they would have surrounded him, and stolen his life-wind away from him. They would have taken his breath and made it their own.

As her eyes fluttered open, her spell on them broke, and most dissolved into breezes and flower petals and fallen leaves. With a soft hum, she brought them back to pseudo-life as she kissed Prince Charming once more.

She married him a month later, and he left her a year later in favor of Snow White. She wasn't bitter about it, though. She was happy enough, with Mallowbarb and Sweetwater and her wind-people friends.

Briar lived in a small cottage as a village healer for the next three hundred years.

Sometime around then, her story became legend, and became known to the Brothers Grimm. At her request, small details of her tale were changed—instead of a rose, a spinning wheel. Three fairies, not two. No wind-people, no golden garden.

A hundred years after, a mob came after her. Her godmothers whisk her away, and the wind people fight valiantly to distract everyone from their lovely Creator, the once Princess, Briar Rose.

They leave for America with the Grimms within the next months.

Briar Rose swears to never sing of dancing wind-people ever again.

**III. Ships (the sailing kind and the friend kind)**

Sometimes, Briar Rose considers singing for a ship to pass her through the barrier or simply singing the barrier down. Magic obeyed her voice, after all.

But then she considers—what ship would come to her, and where could she go? Her home is undoubtedly destroyed, and the wind-people are surely gone. Her family crumbled into dust four or five centuries ago, and while she can sail across a sea, she certainly can't sail across the gap between life and death.

And then Wilhelm respected her and she helped found Ferryport Landing, providing some of the magic for the barrier, and she's almost a Grimm herself now.

She doesn't pine over Prince Charming—she never really loved him, she thinks—and tries to make friends with the other princesses, who coolly rebuff her.

Briar is a godmother herself now—the godmother to Baby Beatrice and Baby Basil. She's Auntie Briar until they grow up, and then she's simply Briar and they're Trixie and Basil.

Sometimes she would sing for Trixie, sings a tree into gold and back again, because Trixie is the first real friend she's had since the wind-people, and it can be argued that the wind-people weren't really her friends anyway because they weren't actual people.

Trixie helps her open the coffee shop, makes it a coffee shop/bookshop hybrid, but when Trixie turns twenty-three, she leaves Ferryport Landing, leaving to explore the world, marry rich men captivated by her ethereal beauty and to write action filled letters back home to Briar and Basil.

Briar thinks she might love Basil, the gawky little boy who has grown up to be kind and handsome and helpful. But she's his godmother and that wouldn't be proper (also, Mallowbarb has threatened to magic Briar's voice away if Briar even so much as flirts with her own godson) and so Briar doesn't say anything. Basil leaves two years later, when he's twenty.

He returns four years later with a wife, Relda (Briar loves Relda as a sister, really, and she's glad she never said anything to Basil, because he's the kind of person who would have loved Briar simply for loving him and he never would have gone and found Relda who makes him _happy_) and soon Briar finds herself at the center of another generation of Grimm children.

There are two of them—Henry and Jacob, and they're both very sweet children. Unfortunately for Briar, Relda is extremely protective of her children and Briar doesn't exactly pass her approval (Briar has a sneaking suspicion that Sweetwater, a boiling hot cup of tea and a yellow sailboat had something to do with it but neither Sweetwater nor Relda bring it up) so Briar doesn't interact much with the Grimm family for a decade or two.

The coffee shop begins to pick up business around the late 1980s, and Briar, being her stubborn self, refuses to hire more help. Mallowbarb and Sweetwater flit around the shop, but they were more often hindrances than helps.

Goldilocks is her first real friend in town, and she spends her Saturdays in the coffee shop, sitting at the counter and laughing with Briar over absolutely nothing. They gossip and chat, and sometimes they'll go shopping together, although not often.

Goldie likes to talk, and Briar likes to listen, and so everything works out, and over the course of any given three minutes, Briar learns everything she never wanted to know about her best friend, including the facts that Goldie loves daffodils but hates roses, can knit if she tries but when she doesn't try she gets knots, that she had four brothers and sisters and she's the unfortunate oldest and the only Everafter, that pink isn't her color despite her blondness, and that she's considered dying her hair pink even though it isn't her color just for the fun of it.

Goldie is in love with Henry Grimm, and Briar's had the dubious pleasure of accompanying them on double dates. They're the cutesy "I-love-you-no-I-love-you-_more_" type couple, and honestly, it grates on Briar's nerves sometimes. But she gets to sit and talk with Jacob Grimm, and he's a bit of a sweetheart—gawky and nerdy, but also sweet and caring, and they're good friends. They've got the same taste in books and movies, and while Briar Rose knows she's not in love with him, she knows she could love him.

But thankfully, Jake isn't interested in dating—not right now, at least—and they're friends, best friends almost.

And then the whole Jabberwocky-barrier incident happened.

Briar is perhaps the only non-Grimm that knows everything that happened, perhaps the only person with the whole story tucked into some corner of her mind.

She'd been dragged into everything by a frantic Relda ("Is Henry here? Is Jake here? No, oh,_God_, this day can't get any worse, Basil went after Jake, I haven't seen them in three hours, Goldilocks is missing, Jake is missing, Henry is missing, oh, God, this really can't get any_worse_,") and had helped search for the three missing Grimms. She was the one to find Basil's body, and she was the one to pick up the phone was Jake called to say he wasn't returning.

Goldie called her four hours later, sobbing.

"God, Rosie, it was-it was my fault, all my fault, if I hadn't asked Hank t-t-t-toooo let me goooo this never would've ha-happened!" she wails into the phone, and Briar Rose blinks rapidly, trying to process why she's suddenly on the phone with her presumed-dead best friend at three in the morning after a twenty-seven hour day that involved four disappearances, two depressive-suicidal family members and at least one person dead. And a jabberwocky on the loose as well, thank you very much.

"Goldie?" she manages. "Where are you? Is Jake with you?"

And that just sends Goldie into another round of tears.

It takes twenty minutes, but Briar Rose manages to figure out that Goldie hasn't seen Jake, is currently on a train to New York City, and she's scared out of her mind.

They talk for a while, until Goldie promises to call at the same time next week and hangs up.

Life begins to settle back into a pattern, and then everything changes again, six months later.

A kind young lady, Veronica Blake, wanders into town, researching for a novel on small towns and close-knit communities, and so Veronica ("Ronnie, _please"_) spends a lot of time in Briar's coffee shop, talking to the locals.

At first, Briar thought Ronnie was an Everafter. It was the eyes, the blue-grey old soul eyes that seemed to have seen everything, seemed to have seen the world as it changed and evolved and became something terrible.

Ronnie later explains that her father had walked out when she was six; her mother had died of cancer when she was fifteen and she had attempted to raise her younger sister Sabrina and younger brother James in her mother's stead. She had failed—Jamie had joined up with a gang and as an initiation, he killed Sabbie and left Ronnie in critical condition.

Briar doesn't ask much about Ronnie's upbringing after that.

They become fast friends—Ronnie isn't Goldie, but at least it's a friend.

Henry wanders in one afternoon (it's the early 90's, by then) and he sees the beautiful author and she sees the handsome local boy and its love at first sight. They get married, and within two years, Ronnie Grimm is pregnant with their first child ("James if it's a boy, Sabrina if it's a girl, just to remember Jamie and Sabbie,"), and then some serious stuff begins to go down.

Someone sends a death threat to the Grimms, specifically targeting Ronnie and the unborn Grimm baby, and Henry freaks out spectacularly. Before anyone can even blink, Henry and Ronnie are gone, back to New York, to Ronnie's hometown. The Junior Grimms cut all contact. Ronnie and Henry don't call, don't send a forwarding address, don't contact anyone in Ferryport Landing. They're simply gone.

Until Briar gets a letter with no return address, sent from an anonymous post office in New Jersey. Inside is a sheet of paper with only three words on it. _Never regret anything_, in Ronnie's beautiful handwriting.

It makes sense—Ronnie always lived for the present and the future, never the past. Ronnie showed her a lot, and, as Briar thinks it over, it only makes sense for her to follow Ronnie's instructions. She owes the woman for her friendship and the hours of easy companionship. It won't ever be replaced, she knows with a deep ache in her heart. It can't ever be replaced.

So, for the first time in her life, Briar Rose swears two things at once.

Briar Rose swears to never regret anything.

She also swears to never speak of Ronnie ever again.

**IV. Death (of a love and a dragon and a princess and a whole lot of other people)**

Twelve years pass, and then everything is…different.

Sabrina and Daphne Grimm show up—Sabrina is mini-Ronnie, with Henry's hair but Ronnie's old-soul eyes. Daphne is mini-Henry, with Ronnie's dark coloring and Henry's warm brown eyes.

Life is thrown into chaos, so much more than either of the World Wars ever did, and so much more than when she was being hunted by the angry villagers. There are fights and wars and things go missing and reappear and Relda is thought to be dead for a while but then it turns out she's not and there's a giant involved and_Jake_.

Jake is back and he's different. Proud but not cocky, worn but still new. He's something that's purely Jake, and Briar Rose can't help but fall in love with him.

And he _loves her back_.

They make their way through this war—he protects her, she protects him. She'd defend him to the death.

And she actually does.

It's a simple mistake they make—Mallowbarb and Sweetwater have a stock of magical weapons they've accumulated over the years. They're back at the coffeeshop to get them (the coffee shop and the apartment above where Briar has lived for the past forty years) and then it's an attack.

"Rosie! Run!" Sweetwater shrieks, using her wand to blast a particularly nasty looking goblin. "Get back to camp!"

"No! I'm not leaving you and Mallow!"

Sweetwater seems to realize it's a hopeless cause—either that or she decides blasting goblins is a more efficient use of her time.

And then the Grimm girls and Jake show up.

Sabrina is a goose, for some reason. Briar doesn't think it's a fashion statement, not when Sabrina keeps squawking to be turned back to human, but the girl could pull it off if she really wanted to.

It worked for Mother Goose, it can certainly work for Sabrina.

They leave the weapons behind and take off for the Grimm-side camp and thankfully, Sabrina is back to normal.

And then a dragon shows up.

Seriously? A goddamn, bloody _dragon_.

Where did the Hand even _get _a _dragon_?

Jake's the one who fights it, stepping forward to block and to defend his nieces and his girlfriend.

And then…he's not.

"JAKE!" she screams, and watches in horror as his body is engulfed by the dragon's flame.

She failed. She didn't defend him to the very end. She failed, she failed, she failed.

But there's still Sabrina and Daphne. She can save them even if she can't save Jake.

And besides, what more is there to live for?

She's kept her promises—she never sang of life and death, never sang of dancing wind-people made of leaves and air. She never regretted anything in her long, long life, and she never spoke of Ronnie, even when there was a possibility she might return. What else was there to keep her here on Earth?

She thought it over, and when her long, long life flashed before her eyes, only one thing stood out to her, only one thing was worth living for.

Jake.

And if Jake was dead, what point was there in living? What point was there in anything at all? There wasn't, and so she made her decision without thinking twice.

Briar Rose leapt forward to meet the dragon.

_…  
I sang of leaves, of leaves of gold and leaves of gold there grew  
Of wind I sang, a wind there came and in the branches blew…  
…But if of ships I now should sing, what ship would ever come to me?  
What ship would bear me ever back across so wide a sea?  
…_

**A/N: That last line was the first line I wrote, and I just worked backwards from there. So, how'd I do?**

**R&R?**


End file.
